


bedsheets

by Anonymous



Category: Half Life
Genre: M/M, No Dialogue, Scars, i haven't played hl2 yet but this wouldn't leave my mind so pardon the inaccracies, implied sex, mainly just thinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:47:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26154448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The HEV suit left some scars...Barney saw these
Relationships: Barney Calhoun/Gordon Freeman
Comments: 8
Kudos: 107
Collections: Anonymous





	bedsheets

**Author's Note:**

> NSFW doesn’t have to be honry; it can be an art-form

They had spent the night exploring each other bodies. 

Gordon, well, he was like an ocean. No, like a desert. Maybe like a rainforest? There wasn’t really any environmental metaphor that Gordon could compare to that Barney could think of. The other man was too complex to compare to anything really.

In essence, he was...Gordon. Passionate, shy, overwhelming in the best way, and full of little secrets. 

Barney didn’t realize how much he didn’t know about him. A lot had changed in the 20 years since Gordon left and that included Gordon too though it wasn’t from the years, it was from the resonance cascade. Sure, 20 years had caused his memory to become a bit hazy as to all the exact features Gordon had but there were some Barney never saw.

Barney felt Gordon shuffle aside him and in response, Barney lifted his arm to let Gordon go. He cracked his eyes open, the rising morning sun shining in lines through the blinds on Gordon’s bare form. 

Barney took in a sharp breath. 

Gordon was sitting on the side of the bed the thin cream-colored sheet hanging off his right shoulder, draping across his form, facing away from Barney. Barney thought it made him look like one of those Roman emperors: powerful, pristine, and only wearing a sheet. However, the sheet still exposed the majority of Gordon’s bareback. One large circle was carved into his shoulder blade, three significantly smaller circles trailed along the side of his spine and one medium-sized circle rested on his hip bone. From what Barney saw, he assumed that the circles reflected across Gordon’s spine. They must have been from the HEV suit morphine injection system as the circles were mechanical, man-made, and intentional.

It couldn’t have been a design flaw as he knew how all the scientists at Black Mesa boasted of their intellect and incapability to making mistakes. Bullshit on that, they’re the folks that caused the resonance cascade and the damn ending of the world. Barney wasn’t angry or surprised about the scars, per se as he had felt the scar tissue before when they did the deed. He had seen glimpses of them from a hospital smock Gordon wore before he went away.

He remembered tracing the scar tissue as Gordon kissed his neck, round and round in a circle, syncing up with Gordon’s tongue. 

A ting of regret filled Barney’s chest. He wasn’t there for Gordon during that traumatizing time. Barney couldn’t imagine what Gordon had gone through during his slow crawl from out of Black Mesa. Hell, he still had PTSD from the event and he had seen some fucked-up shit before while on the job as a security guard. He was at least more mentally and physically prepared for the killing and running. He knew Gordon could handle himself but...a 27-year-old MIT graduate being thrown into the center of an alien apocalypse only with limited ammo and a crowbar in hand killing these monsters for the first time? 

That was a lot to go through. That was a lot to process. 

Did...Gordon even have the time to process all of this? 

Barney knew that to Gordon it had only been a week at most from the start of the Resonance Cascade. His eyes flickered over the still slightly inflamed skin around the circular scars. Due to being in status, Gordon didn’t really have time to heal properly. 

Though despite all of this, Gordon was here now and Barney could see that. Hell, he felt that. Gordon was real, his beautiful yet conflicted head turned away from him displaying his scars. Scars weren’t inherently beautiful nor defining but they were apart of him. His body knitting together the mechanical injuries into messy ridges, fighting against the intentional design, and making the scars his own. 

This wasn’t a dream, no, Gordon-fucking-Freeman was right in front of him, in the flesh, his scarred back turned towards him, a sheet lazily draping off the side of his shoulder. He was here with Barney, basking in the dim sunlight of the early sun. 

The scene unfolded before Barney lasted for a split second...maybe a minute as most but that didn’t matter. Barney was here now and he, for damn sure, was going to do his darndest best to support Gordon through this. 

Barney moved slowly, abs slightly burning from the prior events the night before. He wrapped his arms around Gordon from behind and gave him a small kiss on the neck before sliding off to get dressed again. The moment was infinitely short but they had business to do. 

They were going to get through this together.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading please leave a comment :)


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